Nathan Glick shows his WWII sketches.

How do we, as civilians, understand war?

Nathan Glick, a WWII veteran and combat artist, brought World War II to life for SUPER teachers June 11 with his portfolio of portraits of heroic WWII pilots and sketches of combat and soldiers at leisure. At 98 years old, Nathan Glick vividly remembers every location where he witnessed and recorded the personal stories and graphic images of WWII. Last week at the SUPER Institute, teachers explored World War II, considered by many to be the last “good” war, through art, music and literature. The lead scholar, Dr. Alan Brown, professor of English at the University of West Alabama, showed the PBS documentary film “They Drew Fire” about the 100 U.S. servicemen and civilians who served as combat artists in WWII. You can see the art gallery of their work, often unseen since the war, on the PBS website.

Members of the June 9-11 SUPER Institute program.

The SUPER Teacher Institute exemplifies the theme of the keynote address “Student Voice—through the Arts” by Dr. Tommy Bice, the Deputy State Superintendent with the Alabama State Department of Education. Alabama Institute for Education in the Arts (AIEA) invited Dr. Bice to be the luncheon speaker for the AIEA Teacher Institute in Montgomery, an AHF grant-funded project. Dr. Bice challenged teachers to listen to students and understand their interests through the arts. As an example of the integration of arts to teach the core curriculum, he used his own positive educational experience in the arts in elementary school in Alexander City. As a young student, he played the Mad Hatter in the play “Alice in Wonderland.” In an effort to decrease the number of dropouts in Alabama schools (currently about 5,000 a year), Dr. Bice believes that all children can become engaged through the arts. He quoted Ron Edmonds, an influential educational researcher: “We can, whenever and wherever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us.” The arts are a powerful tool to hear the student’s voice and to teach history, literature and mathematics.

Written by: Susan P.

Pieces should be no more than 150 words in length. Please include your full name, the city in which you live and daytime phone. E-mail your response to rlitchfield@gannett.com. Deadline is 10 a.m. tomorrow.

Caught off guard? Maybe, but even the seasoned travelers who have witnessed the seat belt, flotation device and emergency exit routine countless times now fix their eyes on the uniformed attendant.

Commanding people’s attention is difficult with the increasing number of distractions that assail our senses daily. While this flight attendant used a creative approach to capture our interest, live communication seems to be losing its appeal today. An appeal has come for families to sit down and talk about their lives with each other.

A family in Tennessee initiated the first National Day of Listening, a campaign to emphasize the importance of capturing oral history from their elders before the opportunity is lost. What better way to preserve unique family culture? Yet, some families are reluctant to talk about their past for various reasons.

I remember my mother’s refusal to tell her story about growing up in her sharecropper family. She countered questions about her childhood with the admonition, “Remember, the best part of our family is here and now.” Had I not interviewed numerous friends and relatives after her death, I would not have discovered my family’s Scots-Irish culture and language, rich and colorful even with its warts and scars.

The quest for oral family history is an integral tool for studying humanities. In recent years, this very effective approach for understanding history has found a niche in elementary and high-school classrooms. Teachers require interviews with family members, grandparents and other retirees to demonstrate to students the relevance of the past to their own lives. The results of these interviews may even be documented through quilts, photographs, DVDs, videos, drama productions, journals and storytelling. Furthermore, these projects often become the focus of community heritage celebrations.

The Alabama Humanities Foundation is pleased to have supported numerous oral history projects through the Jenice Riley Memorial Scholarship, which is now accepting applications. Moreover, these assignments enable students to develop effective listening skills. Recording oral history is not limited to schoolchildren. Do you recall the popular television show several decades ago which opened with, “The city has a million stories to tell, and this is just one of them?” There is a wealth of untold stories in every Alabama community, in every Alabamian waiting to be told and recorded—one of the greatest treasures we can leave for the generations that succeed us.

As my plane lands in Birmingham and taxies toward the terminal, several passengers, contrary to the attendant’s instructions, release their seat belts. “Not yet!” she warns. Another click. “Not yet!” The command is louder this time. Then as the plane comes to a stop, she mockingly declares with feigned disgust, “Now. . . get out!” Maybe it’s time to get out and mine that mother lode of stories in your community. AHF is here to help. Click here to learn more.

Written by: Bob W.

Here are brief excerpts of the three articles, along with reports about related AHF programs:

Brookside, Alabama, mayor leading his town back after devastating flood
by Monique Fields

• Brookside, once a thriving mining town settled by immigrants from Slovakia, was all but washed away by a flood in 2003. The city’s town hall was destroyed, as were homes and businesses. But the town and its 1,400 residents have been steadily staging a comeback. In October, Brookside opened a $3.5 million municipal complex. A new $425,000 fire station, the final phase of the project, is scheduled to open in August.

  The town has a long to-do list. There is the Brookside Greenway Festival and the Russian Food Festival, annual events that draw hundreds to the area. Then there’s the historic home that sits at the town’s center, awaiting refurbishment into a museum…

AHF will be doing its part to assist Brookside’s revival. In March, we awarded a $5,571 exhibition grant to CAWACO, a regional economic and community development agency that is focusing on creating a Five Mile Creek Greenway through Brookside. Our grant will provide funds for a public program in conjunction with the creation of a historical mural in the Brookside Town Hall rotunda.

Birmingham, Alabama’s, Tannehill State Park may host memorial to unheralded labor, lives of slaves
by Rahkia Nance

• Not much hints at the slave life that existed during the 1860s at the area that is now Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park. Piles of rocks where chimneys once stood are the only silent reminders that a community ever occupied these wooded corners of west Jefferson County.
  But as a Fairfield woman unturned the stones of Tannehill, she happened upon a rarely mentioned part of Alabama’s history: the slave labor that supplied blast furnaces…

  [Shirley] Ferrill is now on a mission to memorialize those slaves and would like to erect a memorial at the park. She came up with the idea after attending a Juneteenth festival last month in Birmingham. Juneteenth marks the date in 1865 when slaves in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom.

  Lost history:

  “We’re so busy researching and celebrating what happened in other states, and we have our own history right here,” said Ferrill, a former social worker. “I think it is so sad that we really don’t know about our history and don’t take advantage of opportunities to learn about it.

  “So much of our history goes undocumented and, it’s just not talked about,” Ferrill said. “I think there’s a lot of resentment and embarrassment in Alabama. Most people tend not to want to talk about it. But you have to have some knowledge to gain some knowledge.”

I regret that Ms. Ferrill did not know about our recent SUPER institute, “Slavery in Alabama: Public Amnesia and Historical Memory.” More than 20 teachers from across the state participated in this intensive one-week institute, co-sponsored by AHF and the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery. It was the first program of its kind in the state. These teachers will now return to classrooms from Huntsville to Mobile with the latest and most scholarly information about the history and legacy of slavery in our state.

Facing the elephant in the classroom
Guest editorial by Cynthia Ryan, associate professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham

• As K-12 and university budgets shrink, many Americans wonder how we can reform an educational system fraught with problems: too large classrooms, outdated technologies, underprepared students, frustrated teachers–the list goes on. There’s talk of extending the school calendar, requiring an additional year of high school, offering incentive programs for achievement, increasing the rigor of testing, or better yet, giving more tests!

  While advocates for these approaches to reform do offer some compelling evidence, I’m struck by how many arguments avoid altogether the rather enormous elephant in the classroom: the critical-thinking skills necessary for applying the information students consume in productive, innovative and ethical ways.

I would encourage Professor Ryan to speak with her colleagues in the UAB English department, Jacqueline Wood and Gale Temple. This summer Wood co-led our first SUPER Emerging Scholars Institute for high-school students from underserved school systems, while Temple led a one-week SUPER teacher institute on “American Literature: From Discovery to the Civil War.” Along with many other university scholars who participate in our summer institutes, they have dedicated themselves to answering Ryan’s cry for greater critical thinking skills among Alabama’s secondary teachers and students.

Written by: Bob S.

McCrary repeatedly referred to cultural organizations’ need to “break the code” of business and government leaders. By this he meant we must articulate the value of our missions and organizations in ways that these leaders understand, embrace and ultimately support with their money and votes. Breaking this “code” might be accomplished by:

• Demonstrating, through economic impact studies, the importance of museums, theaters, symphonies and other arts institutions to economic development.
• Using testimonials from teachers, students and education officials to stress the personal and social value of humanities education–as found both in the classroom and in “informal education.”
• Exposing a business person or elected official directly to an artistic or intellectual experience. Such an experience might forever ingrain the arts or humanities into his or her personal vision and values.

Of course, having Charles McCrary in attendance at the summit–and having him verbalize his own appreciation and support of the arts and humanities–was more valuable than our delivering to him a white paper study or catchy sound bite.

We must articulate the value of our missions and organizations in ways that these leaders understand, embrace and ultimately support with their money and votes.

Each fall AHF also tries to include business leaders and government officials, alongside scholars, writers, teachers and other humanities folks, at AHF’s annual awards luncheon (scheduled this year for September 14). By both recognizing them at and encouraging their active participation in this event, we have presented our own “cultural summit” for some 20 years now! (Persistence and perseverance also play crucial roles in “breaking the code.”)

Perhaps we have started a similar tradition with the Cultural Leadership Summit. Over time, such events may make the arts and humanities as much a part of the state’s “code” as math, science, industrial recruitment, religion, politics, football…

Written by: Bob S.

“I know,” said the preacher with a huge sigh, “I have the same trouble in my business.”

So. . .

Go ahead and circle this very important date on your calendar and don’t wait until the last minute. The annual AHF awards luncheon is booked at the Wynfrey Hotel for Monday, September 14, 2009. Don’t miss it!

The luncheon has unofficially been recognized as the kickoff to the community’s cultural calendar. AHF is celebrating its 35th anniversary in 2009, and this year’s luncheon will be the 20th.

We will welcome author Warren St. John as our keynote speaker, who will be introduced by popular sports radio personality Paul Finebaum.

The annual AHF awards luncheon is booked at the Wynfrey Hotel for Monday, September 14, 2009. Don’t miss it!

St. John was born in Birmingham and attended the Altamont School. He later attended Columbia College in New York City, where he now lives with his wife Nicole. His most recent book, Outcasts United, was released in April 2009. It is a real-life story of a soccer team made up of refugee children known as the Fugees. Representing 13 countries, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and led by a coach from Jordan, the Fugees unite the small town of Clarkston, Ga.

The 2009 Alabama Humanities Award will be presented during the luncheon, as well as the 2009 Jenice Riley Memorial Scholarships. This year’s winners are to be determined.

Stay tuned..and mark your calendars!

Photo credit: Charles Thompson

Written by: Paul L.

A summary of the Institute and its aim follows:
For generations, Southerners have made the effort to remove the protection of slavery as a primary cause of the Civil War; going so far as to deny the evidence presented in ordinances of secession as well as state constitutions and the Confederate Constitution itself. The veneration of the Civil War as the romantic “Lost Cause” has influenced how school boards have selected texts, how teachers have chosen to teach, and most importantly, how students have come to understand the history of their country, region and state.

The ultimate goal is for us to move away from modern political assumptions and get ourselves and our students to think historically about how the influence of slavery has shaped America.

This historical blind spot is not just the creation of a national obsession with the Civil War. Scholars and the public alike have welcomed discussions about race in Alabama, but for the most part only by focusing on the Civil Rights Movement. No one denies the importance of that struggle, but the brightness of the light shined upon the mid-twentieth century has left the efforts of enslaved men and women in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in relative darkness.

The purpose of this institute is to provide teachers in the state of Alabama with a deeper understanding of the simultaneous development of freedom and un-freedom and importance of the enslaved as well as history of the state, region and nation. The ultimate goal is for us to move away from modern political assumptions and get ourselves and our students to think historically about how the influence of slavery has shaped America.

Institute sessions will include an overview of slavery in a broad world-wide context, as well as the effect of the transatlantic slave trade on the formation of the American colonies, the contradictions inherent in founding a nation of liberty wherein twenty percent of its population lived as slaves, and the implications that this had for the history of Alabama. Click here for session topics and a list of lead scholars.

As with all SUPER Institutes, participants are expected to complete a hefty amount of directed reading prior to the beginning of the program. This year, for the first time, participating teachers will benefit from a blog set up by Dr. Buckner exclusively for teachers to share with each other and Dr. Buckner their ideas, questions, impressions regarding the readings and thoughts about other Institute-related topics prior to the June 28-July 3 program, and afterward to the follow-up workshop in September.

For more information about this program, other 2009 SUPER institutes, and the SUPER Teacher Program, in general, please contact me directly at 205.558.3997

Significant support for this Institute is provided by Old Alabama Town and the Rosa Parks Museum & Library at Troy University Montgomery. Application turnout was strong, as expected, with 4th-12th grade teachers of a surprisingly broad range of subjects applying. The Institute is now fully booked with a waiting list!

Written by: Thomas B.

From discussions at our AHF Humanities Leadership Summit in the fall of 2008, I gained a sense that cultural organizations are a community with collective concerns and impact on Alabama. We realized the collaborative power of technology as a tool and resource for marketing, communication and education. Participants said that coming together on an annual basis was important, at the very least to exchange information and develop partnerships and, at the most, to be a collective voice for the important roles of our institutions–and of the arts and humanities in general in the state.

The time has come to gather together again. Please join us on Thursday, June 25, 2009, at Auburn University’s Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art for what we hope will be a very important gathering of Alabama’s cultural and educational entities.

The 2009 Cultural Leadership Summit, “Advancing Our Cultural Imprint: A Conversation on Increasing Awareness and Building Effective Advocates for the Arts and Humanities in Our Great State,” will focus on the important role of the arts, history and culture in generating a desirable quality of life in Alabama. The goal will be to explore how we can come together to support and showcase our crucial significance to economic development, improvement of human resources and overall enrichment of the lives of the citizens of this state.

We realized the collaborative power of technology as a tool and resource for marketing, communication and education.

• The deadline for registration is June 20, and because space is limited, we urge you to register for this program at your earliest convenience. We also encourage you to stay through lunch for informal networking and discussion, which will surely be as diverse and inspiring as our cultural institutions. A registration fee of $20 will cover the cost of lunch.
• The program will open at 10 a.m. with a welcome by Auburn University College of Liberal Arts Dean Anna Gramberg and an address by Charles McCrary, president and CEO of Alabama Power Company. Following his presentation, Alabama State Council on the Arts Executive Director Al Head; Birmingham Art Museum Director Gail Andrews; Alabama Humanities Foundation Executive Director Bob Stewart; Tuskegee Human and Civil Rights Multicultural Center Director T. C. Coley; Alabama Department of Archives and History Director Ed Bridges; and B.B. Comer Memorial Library Director Shirley Spears will offer responses.
• Hosted by the Alabama Humanities Foundation, the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts at Auburn University, the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, also at Auburn University, and the Alabama Museums Association, the meeting builds on and extends the leadership summit held in Birmingham last fall.

In difficult economic times, cultural institutions too often find themselves being relegated to a secondary position as the state and individual communities struggle to deal with financial cutbacks. The reality is that in such hard times, the role of educational and cultural entities becomes even more vital as a place for dialogue and learning. We not only provide programs for free or minimal cost, but we also provide learning experiences that empower people to set priorities and make decisions for our future.

We hope you will join us and encourage your colleagues, partners, and board members to do the same. Please feel free to bring information on your organization to share with attendees. Table space will be available to display brochures and other materials.

Please register today!

Written by: Susan P.

Artwork: Irene Rice Pereira (1907-1971). Composition 1945. Ink and gouache on paper. Collection of the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University. Advancing American Art Collection. 1948.1.28.